T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution Epilogue Second May Be Best—Theorizing the Global Urban from the Middle Xiangming Chen and Michael Magdelinskas Instead of a more conventional conclusion that can echo the introduction in making an edited volume coherent, we have opted to ofer a shorter epilogue to reflect on the most important lessons that can be distilled from the preceding chapters and to also bring clarity to their collective contri- butions. We do so from the premise and rationale for the book: bringing together a set of less studied, secondary (see Map I.1 again) cities and going beyond making them more familiar and important for their own sake, but also making suicient sense out of them with the intention of contributing to a richer theorizing of global urbanism. REFRESHING SCALE AND POWER While the urban literature has become more comparative, diverse, and global over the last two decades or so, it has sustained a strong focus on scale and power, often in combination, as two salient features that draw research attention to certain cities. In one major strand of the literature, the study of world or global studies continues to be shaped, perhaps justifiably so, by the frameworks developed by John Friedmann and Saskia Sassen (Kanna and Chen introduction, to this volume), emphasizing the economic power of a number of world cities (not just New York and London) in a global hierarchy or network. Along a diferent research trajectory, scholars have brought a number of economically rising cities of the global South that are often, but not exclusively, of megascale, like Shanghai and Mumbai, under the analytical microscope. The two editors of this book are recent contributors to this discourse, with their work on Shanghai and Dubai, respectively (Chen 2009; Kanna 2011). This continued emphasis on cities of scale and power leaves out many other cities that may not meet either or both criteria. We end up paying a price for missing the empirical and theo- retical insights that can be extracted from studying those excluded cities. To redress the bias toward large scale and great power in choosing what cities to study, we first need to get a glimpse on the relative weights of dif- ferent-sized cities in shaping the present and future urban world. According Chen & Kanna 1st pages.indd 248 Chen & Kanna 1st pages.indd 248 2/23/2012 12:07:00 PM 2/23/2012 12:07:00 PM